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The Rebecca (1962), one of Indiana's early paintings, is part of the new retrospective of his work that opens at the Whitney today. (Image source: Galerie Gmurzynska)

Beyond Love, the Robert Indiana retrospective that opens today at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is a long overdue celebration of the depth and breath of the 85-year-old Indiana's work over five generations.

It's also a reminder that even iconic artists, in this case, one of the most celebrated pop artists of the 1960s, can become so famous for one series of work and one idea that it overshadows everything else that they produce - and its market value too.

Everyone knows Indiana for his Love image (below), which he first created for a Museum of Modern Art Christmas card in 1966, but that also featured in a series of his paintings and sculptures and in a mass of unauthorized reproductions around the world. Adam D. Weinberg, director of the Whitney, said at the preview yesterday that it became so embedded as a cultural reference and as a symbol for a whole generation in the 1960s that it “eclipsed everything else he did”.

So this retrospective focuses on the diversity of his other work, including his vertical sculptures made from wood that he salvaged in the 1960s from the warehouses that were being razed around his studio, then at Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan, his early abstract geometric paintings from the 1950s and early 1960s, his Confederacy Series, which include his scathing attack on the states that were home to so many civil rights abuses in the 1960s, and even the collages of costumes that he designed for the opera The Mother of Us All.

At Beyond Love, which opens today. (Image source: Kathryn Tully)

Mathias Rastofer, director of Switzerland's Galerie Gmurzynska, which represents Indiana in Europe and contributed several of Indiana's early pieces to Beyond Love, including his 1962 oil on canvas The Rebecca, says that the multiple editions of Indiana's work, such as his Love series, have dominated the market for his work for the last 20 years.

He says that his Love sculptures sell for anywhere between $200,000 to $2 million, but that there's been relatively little interest in his unique paintings and sculptures from the 1950s and 1960s, even though there aren't many around and those that are rarely come up for sale, because many are held in museum collections.

“There are probably only a handful that can come to the market, but if you look at the prices that this work sells for compared to his contemporaries like Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, there's certainly lots of room for them to go up from here.”

Rastofer says the fact that Indiana quit New York in 1978 after rising to fame there to move to the isolated island of Vinalhaven in Maine, where he has lived ever since, hasn't helped the market for his work either. (Vinalhaven is so isolated that Indiana endured a ferry crossing and a 12-hour road trip to get back to New York for the opening of his retrospective because he hasn't flown since 9/11.)

Rastofer thinks that Indiana's first major museum retrospective, that Wienberg suggests is the biggest collection of his work ever assembled, will raise the profile – and the prices – for all of Indiana's art. After all, some of this work, which has come from Indiana's personal collection and from museums and private collections around the world, is being shown in public for the first time. In fact, Mathias says that in anticipation of this exhibition, there's already been more movement in the market. “When it comes to his unique paintings, rather than his editions, we're already seeing much more interest.”